


Der Himmel Über Brooklyn

by TheAstronomyMod



Category: Blixa Bargeld (Musician), Einstürzende Neubauten
Genre: Consent is Sexy, F/M, First Time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-11
Updated: 2017-08-11
Packaged: 2018-12-14 02:56:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11774058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAstronomyMod/pseuds/TheAstronomyMod
Summary: Blixa Bargeld sneaks four teenage punks into Einstürzende Neubauten's 1985 gig at The Ritz, in exchange for facilitating a drug deal for him. Heavy drug use and teenage lust lead to a rather sweet but very sexy encounter.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Content notes for lots and lots of drug abuse, right from the start. The plot involves sex with someone who is 17, which is the age of consent in the locality where the acts take place. If you're not OK with that, you might not want to read it.
> 
> The events depicted are fictional, and any resemblance between original characters and the author's teenage reprobate partners in crime is entirely your imagination.

“You guys should just go to the show without me,” offered Sweet Baby Aurora in a plaintive tone, with a deliberate set to her lip that made it perfectly clear that although she was trying her best to be noble, she would obviously consider it a severe betrayal if we left her. She heaved her huge black vinyl rucksack up onto her lap and started to dig through its contents as if looking for a subway token, but other than that, she made no move to leave. Gemma glanced at me, like she wanted confirmation that it would actually be OK to take her up on this offer, but The Naz cut her off.

“Don’t be stupid. We’re not going in without you,” she said with a decisive nod of her head, as she finished rolling her joint. With the deliberate attention of a mother cat washing a kitten, she sealed it up with her tongue, then tapped it carefully to make it look as tight and perfect as a regular cigarette. Gemma followed her movements with her eyes, gazing at the joint with longing, but The Naz tucked it carefully into her pack of Marlboro Lights.

Gemma coughed politely, to indicate she wished to speak, then thrust her hands deep into the pockets of her leather jacket and piped up. “You heard what Gary said. If it were up to him, he’d let her in. But it’s Priscilla on door tonight, and you know she’s got it in for Aurora.” Four pairs of eyes turned at once to the venue’s door, which remained firmly shut.

We were all sitting on the steps of a brownstone opposite The Ritz, and arguing, as we so often did, about ID. The Naz was 19, and so she could drink, no problem. Gemma and I would both be OK getting in, as it was a 16 and over show. But Sweet Baby Aurora was 15, and Priscilla did indeed have some weird beef with the kid, claiming she had made eyes at her bass-playing boyfriend at an all-ages show at CBs last month. (Sweet Baby Aurora said it was more like Priscilla just had it in for Asian girls – last year, she flat-out threw out some Japanese art students from NYU and nearly caused some international incident – but her thing for bass-players was well known enough for the accusation to stick in the scene.)

“And anyway, we already got tickets,” continued Gemma, her voice growing more urgent. “They weren’t cheap.”

“So scalp ‘em,” snorted The Naz, blowing her crimped black hair out of her face to light a cigarette. “Then we can go to Tower and buy a Neubauten bootleg and watch it on VCR back at Aurora’s, so that we can all have fun, instead of just you guys for a change.”

“Why are you always so over protective of Aurora? She’s not a baby. She is actually fifteen years old, not a child. Like, if you hadn’t made us cut out early at Danceteria, we could have actually met Depeche Mode...” Gemma started whining, in that spoiled rich-girl voice that really wound up The Naz.

“Why do I give a fuck about some fucking English pussies who sound like Howard fucking Jones and look like four fucking poodles on parade...” The Naz spat.

I was already starting to tune their usual argument out, when I turned, and blurrily noticed that the door across the road had opened again. Thinking it was Gary coming back out to talk to us, I stood up and stepped down onto the sidewalk, raising my hand to wave.

Now my eyesight was not so great, and I was never very good at faces. But even I could tell it was not Gary. On the other side of the street, a tall, thin, almost emaciated streak of piss in leather trousers extricated himself from the interior of the club, and shoved a dark, spikey rats nest of hair out of his eyes before looking about, blinking as if the sunlight genuinely hurt his blister-white skin. Screwing up his face against the brightness of day, he turned and caught sight of me, stupidly caught mid-wave. And to my great surprise, he nodded at me, then slowly, sideways, almost crab-style, started to pick his way across the street with the purposely nonchalant gait of a man trying not to make it obvious he was approaching a gaggle of girls.

“Guys,” I stuttered, even as Gemma was protesting it was just not fair that we should suffer because of Aurora’s real or imagined crimes, and The Naz was really gearing up for a real spat, but I raised my voice. “Guys!” `

Their eyes followed mine, and conversation stopped dead.

The gaunt Nosferatu reached our side of the street, his blurry features resolving into a pair of enormous eyes, that seemed to stand proud of a pair of cheekbones like the handles of a Greek jug. He peered at us with an expression of wonder and slight mistrust, as if he was worried that he might have made an error in recognition, since on closer inspection, we couldn’t possibly be anyone he knew. Beneath our thrift shop leather jackets and fiercely manic-panicked hair, backcombed into spiky punkish heights with too much extra-strong Aquanette, it was clear close up, that we were just a pile of teenage girls in ripped tights.

But I knew immediately I had to stop him leaving. With his slender hips and his almost geometrically angular face, he was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen, even as his eyes passed, bewildered, over these four teenage punks, wondering what species of mistake he had just made. This was _him_. I recognised him from grainy photos on album covers and in cheap Xeroxed fanzines. He was unmistakable, right down to the roughly shaved patches on the side of his head, turning his wild bush of hair into a semi-mohawk, and those long, spiked sideburns that curved below those impossibly gaunt cheekbones. This was the German musician whose band we had come to see.

My mind flailed, as I grasped for something, anything, from high school German lessons. “Guten Tag,” I blurted out before I could stop myself.

“Tag,” he replied swiftly. He seemed to relax slightly, or at least, he no longer looked quite so much like he was going to leap away immediately, though his face had not lost its startled fawn expression, as he continued to shift his weight from one leg to the other, his hands fluttering to the pockets of his biker jacket then back, He had beautiful hands, long, lilywhite fingers that seemed to express his internal state more accurately than his impassive vampire face.

“Wie gehts es Ihnen?” I enquired stiffly, hoping my accent would pass muster. My companions seemed to be completely frozen into inaction, just staring at him as if they were afraid he would vanish at any moment.

The leather-clad rock star moved closer, peering into my face. I had to tilt my neck to look up meet his gaze, as he was very tall, his height exaggerated by his gaunt thinness, and if I stared straight ahead, I was afraid to find myself looking into a tangled assortment of belts and buckles and zippers that seemed to be binding his leather torso together with metallic straps. I tried to concentrate on his face, but that wasn’t much better. His eyes were such an odd colour, a tropical ocean blue, ringed all round with smudges of black like a sleepy panda, so I slid my gaze down his sharp, pointed nose, and came to rest on the large, soft pillows of his lips. Christ, even his lips seemed an exaggerated shade of pink, like he had been wearing lipstick he had recently kissed off. The lips moved, spoke one word, recognisable though heavily accented.

“Amphetamine.”

“ _Was_?” I almost giggled, wondering if I’d misheard some German word.

But he repeated himself, with an air of urgency, his hands darting back and forth between us, stabbing at the air to articulate his need. “Amphetamine. Ich brauche Amphetamine, verstehen Sie?”

As I simply stared at him, trying very hard not to let my lower jaw flop around like a loose fish, The Naz leapt in. She did not verstehen-Sie a word of German, but she understood the word ‘amphetamine’ alright.

“No way, bro,” she enunciated, exaggeratedly loud, and exaggeratedly clear, in that ‘talking to foreigners’ voice she used when people stopped her on the street for directions. “We do not have any speed. But if you like, I’ve got some weed.”

“Es gibt keine Amphetamine,” I translated at speed. “Aber... wir haben... marijuana?”

“Veed,” repeated the lanky German, and his weirdly elf-like ears seemed to prick up at the suggestion. The Naz sighed deeply, then extricated the joint from her box of cigarettes, and showed it to him. The German’s eyes lit up. “Ja?”

Gemma elbowed The Naz, their squabble over the tickets momentarily forgotten, in her eagerness to share in the drugs. “Alright, alright,” muttered The Naz, and lit it, taking a few puffs before passing it, rather pointedly, past Gemma, over the top of Sweet Baby Aurora’s head (who was still struck so dumb that she hadn’t even taken her polaroid out of her voluminous block rucksack to document this weird experience, like she documented every other aspect of our lives) and handed it straight to the German.

He took a long, slow drag, sucking in his gaunt cheeks until he looked almost totally like some ancient-vampire-god from a 1920s silent film, then held his breath for an impossibly long time before allowing it to seep out from his nose and the sides of his mouth, wreathing his face and his apocalyptic haircut in plumes and whirls of pungent smoke. After another couple of drags of the distinctive burned-rubber scent of The Naz’s cheap pot, he removed the joint from his mouth and passed it, again, not to Gemma, but to me.

I took a baby puff as he examined me. “You are going to zee concert?” he asked, this time in charmingly heavily accented English, a surprisingly quiet, restrained voice, compared to the unearthly screams he produced on his band’s records.

“Well, we sure planned to...” Gemma broached, throwing The Naz a dirty look.

“But we can’t,” cut in The Naz, pointing towards Sweet Baby Aurora with the steel-capped toe of her Doc Martens. “Aurora’s underage. So they won’t let us in.” As the German glanced down at our baby-faced companion, I surreptitiously passed Gemma the joint.

“Do zhey check zee ID? In West Berlin, zhey never check zee ID at clubs. The police do enough of zhat for everyone.” He smiled, a thin, cautious smile that showed the tips of his slightly oversized teeth, and I had to supress a giggle.

“They check here,” retorted The Naz, glaring him down.

“The doorlady at the Ritz has some weird thing against Aurora. Always makes a point of asking for ID just because she knows she doesn’t have any,” I explained tactfully.

The German’s smile broadened into a grin that totally changed his face. He no longer looked like a terrifying vampire-god, he just looked like a handsome but slightly goofy young man. “Zhere is no lady guarding zer door vhere vee loaded in our gear?”

Everyone started talking at once. “Would you sneak us in backstage?” I blurted out, as Sweet Baby Aurora whispered “Oh my god, that would be so amazing, I would be so grateful” in a soft, quiet voice, drowned out quickly by “come on, Naz, there is no way you could object to that” interrupted by a sharp retort of “there’s gotta be a catch, there’s always a catch, I ain’t blowing no roadie...”

A deep but rattling smokers’ cough quieted us. “Chust one condition.” Aurora and Gemma looked almost like they would explode with excitement, while The Naz glared from under her hair sceptically. “I need amphetamine.”

“No way,” spat The Naz, even as Gemma wailed her protest at the unfairness of her refusal, and Aurora looked like she was going to cry. “No fucking way we’re getting you speed. Count me out.”

“I bet you could get speed off PCPete,” I heard my voice say before I could even think of a reason not to. “He’s always trying to slip us dodgy pills and shit.”

The German smiled triumphantly, showing canines that looked almost animal in their size. “PCPete?”

“He’ll be working this evening, at the Hells Angels bar down on East Fourth,” I supplied, to The Naz’s furious expression. “He always does that patch, this time of night. It’s not even that far. Maybe a 20 minute walk? I could show you...”

“There’s no way you can go in there alone,” she hissed, narrowing her eyes at me, with this sort of ‘don’t cross me on this, don’t you dare cross me on this’ expression.

But the German spoke up. “She vill not be alone.”

The Naz turned, looked the German up and down with a contemptuous expression. I could see what she was thinking. He was over six foot, it was true, but he was almost painfully thin, like a good stiff breeze would take him out. And those clothes - leather trousers were par for the course at the biker bar, but those buckles and zips, and that studded bondage belt wrapped around his slender hips, with a shiny silver ring leading the eye down, focused directly on the slight bulge of his crotch – that might work on Christopher Street, but those clothes would get him beaten up that far down in the East Village.

“Fuck me, I’m going with you, aren’t I,” sighed The Naz with a long-suffering glance down at Aurora. “But you’re getting the young’uns in the theatre before I take you anywhere.”

It was all handled so smoothly. We followed him like a black-clad oil slick, across the road, to knock at a second, less grand door, just out of sight of the front entrance. The German dug in his pockets, produced a pass which he showed to a roadie, and then shepherded us inside. I caught only a few words of the rapid-fire German he exchanged with his bandmates and road crew – the words “my guests” and “too young for you” were the only phrases I caught – but suddenly we all had press-on passes. Access All Areas press-on passes. I had only ever seen them before, but never actually held one in my hand. But no sooner had I grasped the excitement of sticking one to the thigh of my jeans, than we were outside again and hailing a cab.

I went for one door, while The Naz went around to the other. To my surprise, the German pushed in beside me, bumping me with his sharp hips to get me to move over. As the cab pulled off into bumpy NYC traffic, he started to look a little green around the gills, crumpled in a corner, wrapped up in his bundle of leather clothes. For a moment, I wondered if I had done something wrong, but as The Naz elbowed me and rolled her eyes, mouthing the words “fucking junkies” I suddenly realised. I was too naïve to even be afraid. I just looked at him, and wanted to put my arm around him, and tell him, don’t worry, PCPete will sort you out.

“Do you want a cigarette? Would that help you out?” The Naz offered as she pulled out her pack.

“Zhank you. Yes.” The pair of the them smoked in silence as the cab made its way down the avenue.

On Fourth Street, The Naz and the German climbed out of the car, but as I moved to follow, she shook her head and told me to stay in the taxi with the meter running. “Stay out of sight. We need to keep small talk with Pete to a fucking minimum,” she muttered as the lanky German followed her forlornly past the motorbikes into the bar. I waited, nervously biting the sides of my fingers, trying to avoid chipping my silver nail varnish any further as the cents spun round on the taxi’s meter. It felt like an eternity, trying to peer in through the dark glass to the smoky interior to see where they had got to, but they were back within three dollars.

The Naz looked pissed off, but the German seemed somehow completely changed, his face more animated, the light glinting in his eyes as he became, well, not chatty but slightly less taciturn, expanding slightly so that he spread a tentative arm along the back of the car seat.

“Did everything go OK?” I demanded, worried.

The Naz burst out laughing. “You should have seen Pete’s face. I told Idiot-Boy here to stay back, out of sight, but of course he comes striding right up, and I swear to god, I thought Pete was going to burst a gasket right then and there, to see me walk in with one of Neubauten in tow. I have never seen Pete quite so quick to try to eat out of someone’s ass. Giving him all kinds of deals, on the house, oh my god can he get Idiot-Boy’s phone number, maybe they can do a record together, and Idiot-Boy playing him like a fucking violin, like I thought he was on the verge of paying you to take his drugs...”

“Please,” said the Idiot. “To strangers, only, am I Idiot-Boy. To my friends, I am Blixa.”

The Naz laughed again, and actually accepted the proffered hand. “Nazia.”

Two eyes like burning lapis lazuli focused, for the first time fully, on my face. “And you? Zer quiet, clever one. How are you called?”

“What makes you think I’m clever?”

He reached out a long, pointed, marble-pale finger, and pointed to a badge on my leather jacket, showing a barely recognisable Antonin Artaud, and started to quote, to my astonishment, from _The Theatre and Its Double_.

“She’s Toni,” supplied The Naz, with a dancing tone I couldn’t tell if it was affection or a vague warning. “But everyone just calls her Toad.”

“Toad,” said Blixa thoughtfully, his fingers still working gently at the seam of my jacket’s leather lapel. “In German, zhis is a ferry beautiful word – Kröte. Don’t you think it’s loffley? It’s onomatopaeic. Kröte.” The way his lips formed it, it did sound beautiful, like a peaceful lake in the country with gently croaking frogs.

“We called her Toad because she used to wear these huge, thick coke bottle glasses at school,” cackled The Naz.

“Shut up!” I yelped, smacking her on the arm, but Blixa turned to look at me.

“You are squinting,” he observed, like he was actually looking at me for the first time. “Do you need to vear glasses?”

I dug in the inside pocket of my jacket, and produced the offending eyeware. “I don’t wear them to gigs, in case they get smashed. Besides. In the Village, sometimes it’s better, the less you have to see.”

“Ha! She doesn’t wear them coz she vain!” hooted The Naz.

I popped the thick, horn-rimmed glasses on my nose and turned to look at Blixa, shocked at the detail my myopic eyes had missed. He wasn’t just handsome. He was beautiful, from his glossy dark hair, to the perfect arches of his eyebrows, to the sweeping black lashes fringing his large, cat-like eyes, to the sharp tip of his nose, to those huge, soft pillow-lips, all now in precise, intimidatingly perfect focus. It was a shock to realise that if I had been so calm before, it was mostly because I could barely see the blurry, out of focus haze of a man. And now here he was, too perfect and far too close, every mascara-darkened lash in high definition.

But he peered back at me and smiled, even reached forward, placing his forefinger gently on the bridge to push them back up my nose. “I like zhem,” he said. The Naz raised her eyebrows at me, but said nothing.

The cab dropped us back outside the Ritz. Blixa didn’t even blink at the bill, but he pulled out a wad of crumpled up dollars from the inside pocket of his biker jacket, and peered at them as if he didn’t understand. “Vhy are zhey all zer same colour and all zer same size? It’s impossible,” he snorted, before thrusting the whole mess at me.

I sorted them into order, shocked at the amount of cash he carried, then paid the driver, leaving a generous tip, and pushed the money back at Blixa. “Don’t wave that about here,” I warned.

“I’m not stupid,” he insisted, folding it away. “I’m from Berlin, not Mars.”

The Naz climbed out of the car, shaking her head. “Well, don’t act like such a fucking tourist.”

But Blixa was in a playful, sparking mood now. “Is it my fault your money is stupid?”

A furtive knock at the backstage door, and the gang was reunited. Gemma was working on a bottle of Heineken and Sweet Baby Aurora had finally worked up the courage to get out her Polaroid. Already, she had amassed an impressive collection of Neubautens posing or pulling silly faces, and she was intent on capturing Blixa as well.

Backstage was weird. I had always thought it would be, well... really glamourous and exciting, tons of food and drink and reporters with tape recorders and probing questions. But it was quite subdued, a mixture of intense boredom and edgy nerves, though everyone seemed out of sorts, hungover maybe. Christ, I was a fool. It took less than five minutes of conferring for Blixa to locate an appropriate surface, and start chopping the grainy white powder into lines. And yet I stared, entranced, as the tray went round. It wasn’t like I had never encountered drugs before. I’d grown up in New York, junkies and crackheads were like a cautionary tale lurking down every subway station and dark alley. But I’d never seen anyone going at it with the systematic zeal as this gang of young Germans.

Blixa noticed me staring, and made a face at me, dabbing at his nose with the back of his hand as if challenging me to either... I don’t know what he wanted, for me to castigate him, or for me to join in? I licked my lips and looked down at the spray of dust left across the tray. “What’s it like?”

“Perfection” said Blixa, without even blinking his huge eyes, which seemed to have grown even wider and wilder since taking the drug. Then the next words out of his mouth stopped time. “Do you vant to try?”

“Toad,” gasped Little Baby Aurora, as she saw my intake of breath, and my eyes grow huge, as if guessing how tempted I was.

“Don’t be fucking stupid,” retorted The Naz.

“I’m not dumb,” I insisted. “I’ve read William S. Burroughs. I’ve listened to the Velvet Underground. I know speed is not like smack. But I’m curious. I just wanna know what it’s like.”

Blixa laughed and shrugged lightly, his thin shoulderblades bouncing back and forth with coiled energy. “Open your moutz,” he directed, then licked his finger, and ran it back and forth across the tray to hoover up all the leftover grains.

“Why?” I said, and suddenly his finger was inside my mouth, probing like a tongue between my lips and my teeth, pushing inside the wet in a way that was almost but not quite erotic. Instinctually, I closed my mouth, not biting down hard, but just catching his finger between my teeth. For a long moment, Blixa and I just looked at one another, shocked, as if some flicker of electricity were passing between us.

I relaxed my lips, feeling them start to tingle, but still clenched his finger in my teeth. He peered into my mouth, transfixed, then shrugged. “You haff good teez. All Americans haff such excellent teez.”

I smiled, and released my hold, setting the offending finger free, though he did not remove it from my mouth.

“Rub it back and forth on your gums,” he directed quietly. “It’s a lot less harsh on your system, to take it zhis vay zer first time.”

“Can I have some?” asked Gemma, never one to be left out of anything, and the moment evaporated, that spark of electricity suddenly dissipated into the ether as Blixa’s hand slipped from my mouth. He moved away from me and started fussing with his hair in a mirror, half watching us out of the corner of his eye as he grabbed chunks of his hair and backcombed it to make it stand up perpendicular.

“Don’t you fucking start,” snapped The Naz.

“If Toad had it, I want some.”

“If Toad jumped off the Empire State Building, you would insist on trying to beat her on the way down,” muttered The Naz.

But Sweet Baby Aurora stepped in before they started to fight in earnest. “If Toad jumped off the Empire State Building, I’d figure she knew something we didn’t, so we should all jump.” She smiled sweetly, and hugged me gently, then turned to the band, whom it was obvious she had all charmed round her little finger. “Can we watch you from the wings, or should we go up on the balcony?”

There were strict instructions about where we could stand and where we couldn’t, and what to avoid, and barked orders about how to stay out of the line of anything that sparked or anything that was on fire, and if Einheit started launching projectiles to get the fuck out of the way. But I staked out a patch behind a thick stand of curtains, from where I could look directly side-on at the microphone in the centre of the stage, and clung to it for dear life.

Already, I could feel a kind of vibrating in my bloodstream, like something in me was changing on the molecular level. My mouth felt as dry as dust, so I looked around, and grabbed an extra beer bottle off Gemma. The taste was all wrong, odd, metallic, but the sensation of the bubbles in my mouth, that was amazing. The bubbles and the low, howling wail of feedback starting up onstage, it was all making my blood thump very fast. No, it wasn’t feedback, it was a tape loop, either some kind of introduction music, or a new song I didn’t know yet, because there was chanting and choral singing, and a kind of wailing in the background.

Blixa stepped up to the microphone, and his entire body seemed to change, lengthening, twisting so that he seemed about seven feet tall, his hair boiling off the back of his head in a matted and spiked halo, burning all gold and red in the stage lighting. And then his voice emerged from the tangle of sound, half hiss, half curse, starting low and escalating until it was almost a howl, “Geh weiter in jeder Richtung / Wir haben Wahrheiten für dich...”

I clung to the curtain as chaos rolled and crashed about me, but I felt oddly calm. The violence of the music soothed me, the noise like a soft warm blanket of calming ocean waves. As my blood hummed and thrummed in my veins, it felt like the world had been sped up, or I had been slowed down, so that all of the information assailing me was happening at a reasonable pace. I drank it all in, the noise, the music, the banshee in leather trousers contorting himself under the lights, stalking about the stage like an animal in a cage, as all around him flames licked at him but never consumed him.

Below me, I was vaguely aware that Sweet Baby Aurora was crouched at my feet, alternately firing off her polaroid, and scribbling in her notebook. She kept staring at Mark Chung with something not so much akin to lust, as complete hero-worship. If an Asian person ever appeared onstage, she would be reduced to mute silence, just staring in complete astonishment at the rarity, though it was hard to tell sometimes if it was admiration or envy. Mark whirled about the stage, swinging his bass-head almost like a club, then dancing back just in time to miss a projectile thrown at a large sheet of rusted metal by one of his bandmates. It was like an elaborately choreographed dance, how close they came to serious bodily harm, and yet how deftly they missed one another’s blows. Aurora raised her camera again, pointed it at him, and he somehow stopped, and stood for a moment, just posing with his bass, flexing the muscles of his wiry arms, until I realised that actually, they had to be aware of our presence, and wondered if it was a distraction or a spur. Did they want something from us, like we wanted something from them? What was it we even wanted from them?

I looked around for my friends. Gemma had gone back to the dressing room for another round of purloined beers, while The Naz stood back in the shadows, her whole face concentrating with a look of intense hunger, intently focused on the stage, her bared teeth glittering in the dark. The Naz had turned cool into an artform, always making a point of looking as studiedly bored as she possibly could, but every atom of her existence was focused on the whirl of chaos and destruction onstage, a nexus of sheet metal and angle-grinders and flying sparks that threatened to set the whole building alight. The only person in the room who looked genuinely unfazed was Blixa, standing in the centre of the stage, spitting fire and bile into the audience with his words, his hands whirling about his face in some kind of theatrical benediction.

They played for over an hour, maybe two. I lost track of time, lost track of all conscious thought, and had it not been for the setlist that Aurora grabbed, right from under Mark’s beady gaze after the show, I would have had no sense of what they played. Lots of it was new, down to the latest single that Gemma had ordered on import, Yü-Gung, a throbbing, pulsing, dancing thing over which Blixa chanted like a man possessed, “feed my ego, feed my ego, feed my ego...” If I tilted my head slightly, I could see out into the audience, everyone up on the balls of their feet, the crowd rising and falling like waves, as idiots risked life and limb trying to climb on top, surging with their entire bodies towards the gaunt strip of leather and hair vibrating at the front of the stage. It looked so different from that angle, I could understand the hunger on The Naz’s face.

And it was all over so abruptly, leaving a roaring in my ears where the music used to be. There seemed to be a surge of adrenaline through the boys as they came offstage, laughing and hugging and jostling, but I felt battered, like I’d lived through some kind of storm. Gemma was now very drunk, hooting and hollering and stomping like the audience that actually seemed to think they could summon the band back through the force of their love. I looked down at Aurora. She looked up at me, almost as shocked as I felt, then hugged my knees, climbing to her feet. Neither of us had any idea what to do, so we both turned and looked to The Naz, who had been backstage at concerts before.

“There will be an aftershow of some kind, but you don’t want to fuck with musicians when they’ve just got offstage,” she said sagely, like she had done this before a hundred times. Her dad had been in a band, so maybe she had. Sweet Baby Aurora nodded and started to pack up her things back into the enormous bag, somehow managing to include a guitar pick, a drumstick and an empty beer bottle that one of the band had drunk out of, before anyone could stop her.

But a shaggy German head appeared around the corner to the dressing room, one hand already draped around Gemma’s shoulders. I suppressed a slight smile of triumph that it was one of the others; she had not charmed Blixa yet. “Girls...” called the German playfully. We blinked at one another, and trooped obediently into the dressing room.

Now, though... now, the dressing room was carnage. I had never seen a small room so stuffed with people, journalists, scenesters, people I knew I should recognise from bands and magazines and fanzines and record labels. I tried to slip between bodies to find a quiet corner, but the place was heaving, and I clung onto Aurora’s hand for dear life. Across the room, I could see Blixa baring his teeth and laughing at a journalist, but I hung back, more than a little afraid of him, now I had seen him in action. He was terrifying, those long, lithe limbs, and how they flailed about. I hung back, nervously biting my lips and trying not to think about how those leather jeans had been pressed up against me in a cab. But that was hours ago. He had probably forgotten all about me.

Someone burst in the door, and announced that there was a free bar opening on the balcony upstairs, now that the audience had cleared out. And that huge crowd of people, they drained out of that tiny room and up the stairs so quickly my head almost spun. But before I could turn to follow them, someone caught my wrist and held me back.

I turned to look into shockingly deep blue eyes. “Zo,” said Blixa. “Tell me vhat you zhought.”

I met his gaze, tough, defiant, a little bit scared, before the devil put the words on my tongue, turning his own words back on him. “The theatre will never find itself again except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams. In which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior. If theatre wants to find itself needed once more, it must present everything in love, crime, war and madness.”

Blixa’s lips drew back from his teeth in that intense, animal smile, as he started gently to laugh. “I like you,” he said, thrusting a long, bony finger into the centre of my solar plexus. “I meant zee amphetamine, zhough. Do you vant some more?”

Licking my lips, I continued to hold his gaze. “I wouldn’t say no.”

He chopped out another line, and inhaled it in one go, then picked up another, thicker dab on the tip of his finger. I opened my mouth and let him rub it into my gums, feeling my blood boiling in my temples, and a kind of roaring in my ears that was more than just the afterburn of the concert. He kept his finger in my mouth, this time, staring at me very intently, as neither of us made a move to stop.

Until suddenly the door banged back, and there was an explosion of girlish giggling. “Guys? Guys? There are free vodka shots upstairs. You do not want to miss this.” Fucking Gemma.

We followed obediently up the stairs, but Blixa would not let me out of his sight, pulling me back with another hand on my wrist once I had obtained two screwdrivers. “Vhat do you know of madness, of cruelty, little girl?” he demanded, not rudely, but more with a playfulness that seemed to be teasing, pushing at me.

“What do you know of teenage girls?” I flipped back, tucking my hair behind my ears.

He was about to retort something, when he was accosted by a journalist, and I could see how a different light came on in his eyes, how he was performing, even when he was offstage, that demanding, imperious tone he used with his public. And then, the interlocutor despatched, he would turn back to me, and turn playful, tossing references to see if I could catch them. And all that voracious reading, late at night in the Greenpoint Library, waiting for my Mom to finish the late shift, my god, it paid off. We talked with ferocity, and wow, who knows what the fuck we talked about, it was probably a load of pretentious garbage, but it felt so intense and so urgent.

I drank in his words, sucking down his knowledge, badgering him to tell me more that I should read if I wanted to improve my German or my mind, as I’d read Walter Benjamin, because he’d mentioned him in an interview, and I’d read a bit of Brecht, because, secretly I really wanted to be a playwright. But it was all so old. What was good in Germany _now_? Blixa blinked, thrust his hand up into his hair and started to tease it with his fingertips, but he looked pleased to be asked. He mentioned a few names, writers, poets, even a few filmmakers, raising his eyebrows to impress upon me that he had always wanted to write the music for a soundtrack, before going on to namedrop a few more people I could only presume were his friends from the Berlin scene.

He warmed to his subject as I stared at him, pushing him to tell me more and more. And I drank it all in, wishing I could push a straw into his head and drink directly from his mind, though I was too naïve to realise that he was actually showing off. For my benefit? It seemed unreal, the rock star showing off for a student. But I was so hungry, so impressed by him,. wanting to impress him, wanting him to be impressed by _me_. And yet I felt so desperate for this intensity, this breadth of conversation, the kind of discussions I hoped and prayed I would have at art school, but I wasn’t at art school yet, I was stuck in my junior year at a shithole dump in Brooklyn and I was just desperately hoping that my ignorance didn’t show, and he didn’t think I was a complete fucking moron.

The upstairs bar at the Ritz melted away. Time wasn’t behaving properly any more. It wasn’t smooth at all, it kept slowing up and speeding down, then abruptly jumping forward five, ten seconds like I’d got distracted and the film reel slipped forwards. Suddenly, we were all in a cab, The Naz in the front, me crushed up against Blixa, and Sweet Baby Aurora sitting on Gemma’s lap, and we were climbing out onto a sidewalk in Chelsea. Oh, the Chelsea Hotel. Someone was throwing a party there, and abruptly it all felt like a terrible mistake because everyone else seemed so unspeakably rich, as if all us downtown punks, and the Neubautens with their scraggly hair and industrial clothes seemed like a bunch of construction workers surrounded by art collectors in vintage clothes and designer suits, examining us like we were the merchandise in a horse fair. One of the women had enormous teeth and I couldn’t stop staring at them, the pearly white of her dress and the pearly white of her dentistry all dazzling me.

Another jump. Suddenly we girls were all in a room, giggling over a bottle of champagne that seemed to have appeared from nowhere, crammed onto a bed that was covered in coats, some of them fake fur, some of them disconcertingly real. Blixa sprawled out across my and Gemma’s laps, as Sweet Baby Aurora took a polaroid of his complex arrangement of belts and buckles. Then another weird time-jump and we were in a bathroom, just Blixa and me, and he was asking if I wanted some more speed, but the wrapper was empty all of a sudden, and as we tried licking the foil, he patted down his pockets and said “Oh. Your friend gave me zhis pill. I haff no idea vhat it is, do you vant to split it?” And stupid-sensible me started riffling through the medicine cabinet and luckily I found a pill-splitter and cut it in half, but Blixa was palming a couple of Valium from a bottle and squirreling them away in a change pocket somewhere.

Jump cut. Abruptly, we were back out on the pavement, and we had Blixa, but we had become separated from the rest of his band, stumbling down the street in the wrong direction, away from the avenue. Blixa had one arm around me and one arm around Sweet Baby Aurora, but it wasn’t like he was hugging us, it was more like we were holding him up, and I would have liked to enjoy it more, but Gemma was already starting to moan about walking because she had worn her stupid, high-heeled pointy-toed boots with the skull buckles, and she had to stop, clinging to a lamppost as she tried to adjust her tights when she cried out “Hold up, you guys, these boots were not made for walking!” and Blixa’s face creased into a wide, wolfish smile, as The Naz and I simultaneously retorted “But that’s just what they’ll do.”

A soft but heavily accented German voice joined in, supplying “Vahn of zheez days zheez boots are gohna valk oll ovur you.”

And with that, we were off. Sweet Baby Aurora caught my eye and glanced up at Blixa. “Is he tall?”

“Well,” I said thoughtfully. “I gotta look up?”

“What colour are his eyes?” called out Gemma, not wanting to be left out as she broke into a trot to keep up, though, typical Gemma, she was doing the lyrics in the wrong order.

“I don’t know, he’s always wearing shades...” I supplied. Blixa cackled to himself, reached into his leather jacket and pulled out a pair of aviator sunglasses.

The Naz started to join in the spirit. “Yeah? I hear he’s bad.”

I had to concentrate very hard to keep from giggling. “Eh, he’s good-bad, but he’s not evil.”

“Is he a good dancer?!” shouted out Gemma and Aurora in unison.

“What do you mean, is he a good dancer?” I laughed back, giving in to my impulse to giggle.

“Well, how does he dance?” intoned The Naz, making it sound like a threat.

Blixa stopped dead, then surprised me by thrusting his arms under mine, lifting me off my feet and swinging me around in a wide circle, as I clung, flabbergasted, to his chest. “Close,” he almost hissed, in that sexy-demon-serpent voice. “Ferry, ferry close.”

He swung me around a few more times, but when he set me down, I was breathless in a way that had nothing to do with dizziness, feeling my heart thudding in my chest, looking up and seeing my eyes, very huge and slightly scared, reflected back at me in Blixa’s mirrored shades.

“Are we embarrassing you?” asked Gemma, hobbling to finally catch up.

Blixa’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a wolfish grin. “I’m being chased about New York City by a teenage girl-gang zinging Shangri-Las songs. Are you kidding me? Zhis is my forever-dream.”

And I don’t remember walking any further, because time did another of those speed-up jobs, but it felt like an hour later, and we were in another bar, and I was starting to feel really, really good, like I just wanted to hug my friends and tell them how much I loved them, and the night was so fucking good, wasn’t it, and wasn’t it amazing, being a teenager in 1985 in New York City, but then Gemma knocked over someone’s beer, and someone started enquiring a little too closely about IDs and suddenly we were all back out on the sidewalk, arguing about whether we should go uptown or downtown. I looked at my watch. Only twenty minutes had gone by since we had left the Chelsea Hotel.

“Screw you guys,” The Naz was saying “I’m gonna walk to the IRT and get the 1 train all the way uptown.”

“All zer vay uptown,” echoed Blixa. “Vhat, like, to Harlem? Do you liff in Harlem? Can you take me zhere? I hear you can get excellent drugs in Harlem.”

The Naz looked at him like he was completely insane. “Uptown to, like Morningside Heights? I’m a freshman at Columbia.”

But Sweet Baby Aurora was trying to drag Gemma back to Queens. “Come to Forest Hill with me, you can crash at my parents’ house, and you know that bodega on the corner will sell you a six-pack if you flirt with the cashier...”

“No, I wanna get a ride with Toad and Blixa back to Brooklyn.” Gemma kept insisting.

“But she lives in Greenpoint, and you live in Park Slope and that’s like two opposite ends of Brooklyn, you should just come back to Queens with me, my Mom has a new bottle of peppermint schnapps we can tap and top up with mouthwash, she will never know...”

And suddenly, unreally, Blixa and I were by ourselves, in a cab flying over the Billyburg Bridge, his eyes all wide and shining as he looked about him, awed by the sudden unexpected views of skyscrapers between the girders of the bridge, half eclipsed by a racing subway train, all lit up like a glowing cage in the dark.

“I haff never been to Brooklyn before,” he announced breathlessly, like he was talking about some mythical, unreal Brooklyn, and not the shithole where I lived.

I didn’t bother to suppress my laugh. “Im Ernst? No kidding!”

“Well, you needn’t tell me you’ff been to Berlin before.” And as he looked the other way, out of the window, across the shining rooftops of Williamsburg, his hand crept across the taxi seat as if with a will of its own, found mine, and grasped it. For a moment, I stiffened, shocked, but as our fingers intertwined, a new, cavalier Toni decided to throw her usual caution to the wind, and see where this took her. His face was pressed against the glass, with a kind of hungry curiosity, drinking it all in with his eyes. And something about that hungry curiosity excited me, made me want him to turn it on me.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So what do you think happens, huh. It gets slightly explicit.

We slid down familiar streets in the dark, but everything seemed new and different and highly charged, watching Blixa’s reactions to them. A Bodega, its blinking yellow and red lights declaring it the only open place of safety in a row of shuttered shops. The huge savings bank with its imposing dome like a temple to American industriousness. The rows of rotting warehouses and decaying factories along the river, then finally the cab pulled up to the reassuring row of tenement houses where I had grown up. Blixa made me do the money thing again, pushing his sunglasses back onto his face to avoid meeting the cab driver’s curious gaze, and then suddenly we were just standing, alone, the two of us, on this street where I lived. He didn’t fit, this weird, awkwardly tall character in apocalyptic leather clothes with a giant porcupine quill of hair, standing disparately on the corner of my parents’ street. I had not thought this through, had I. And yet I decided to just roll with it.

“You gotta be quiet as we go up the stairs. The Super will give us hell if we wake anyone. My Dad works nights, so he won’t be in, but my Mom’s a heavy sleeper so we’re OK once we get to my floor.” Thinking of the Valium he had lifted from the Chelsea Hotel, I decided against telling him the reason for my mother’s deep slumber.

“Your Dad,” he echoed, with a slight edge of disbelief.

“Yeah, I live with my parents, OK,” I replied defiantly. “Rent is expensive in New York.”

“How old are you?” he demanded, the two of us eyeing each other carefully under the sodium glare of the street lights.

“I’m 19, like I told the bartender,” I insisted.

“How old are you really?”

I shifted nervously from one foot to another, wishing I could afford real Doc Martens, which didn’t kill your feet quite like the military jump boots I had bought at the army surplus store. “I’m 17 alright.”

“Christ, Jesus,” swore Blixa.

“How old are you?”

“I’m 26.”

I blinked at him. I thought he was way older, like 30 at least, from all the shit he seemed to have accomplished in his life. “I’m not bothered.”

“Scheisse! I vish you were ten years older. Seventeen feels like... a lifetime ago.”

I just laughed. “Maybe you should be ten years younger.”

He smiled wolfishly; he seemed to like it when I got sassy with him. “I vould ferry much like to kiss you right now, but I could get arrested for chust thinking about it.”

I shook my head, trying to concentrate on the details so as to avoid the meaning of what he had just said. “The age of consent is 17 in New York State.” It was a milestone I had dreaded as I had approached it, but now it was here, I felt a sudden urgency.

Blixa took off the sunglasses, and stared down at me. He was so thin the skin was stretched tight over his cheekbones, which make him look somehow older than he was. “Do you consent?”

“Yeah.” I stuck my hands into my jeans pockets and hunched my shoulders as I squinted up at him, those broad shoulders, those impossibly thick lips.

And he bent down and kissed me. Kissing Blixa Bargeld on a street corner in Brooklyn at, like 3am, like any moment one of the neighbours could open the window and scream down that they were going to tell my Dad they always knew those Pulaski girls were no fucking good, little slut of a daughter kissing some German guy in Nazi jackboots right out on the corner, Jesus, his lips were so soft and so insistent, his hair tangled, slightly hard from the hairspray, but the bits on the side, above his ears, where it was shaved, they were so soft and unexpectedly velvety, his mouth tasting slightly metallic from all the speed and the acid tang of the screwdrivers he had been necking all night. Kissing. My first fucking kiss and it’s Blixa fucking Bargeld, what the fuck have I done.

At last he pulled away. “Huh,” he said. “You kiss like you know vhat you’re doing.”

It was news to me. “Do you wanna go upstairs?”

We crept up the stairs in the dark, holding hands, my heart thumping in my throat. What the fuck was I doing. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew I wanted it really bad. The glare of the cheap lighting made Blixa seem to shine, the leather constricting his skinny thighs as he climbed, and pulled me up beside him. I wasn’t being slow because I was tired, I just wanted to look, watching the way the leather strap of his bondage belt caught between the lobes of his ass as he climbed. Jesus Christ, I did not know a man’s ass could look like that.

We reached the top, panting a little after six flights of stairs, as I fiddled with the lock, holding it to muffle the sound as I cracked the door open. “Wait here a minute,” I instructed, pushing my head in through the gap. The apartment was quiet, just the usual hiss of badly plumbed water pipes and the rattle of the G train a few blocks away. To my relief, my Step-Dad’s keys were gone from the hook by the door, but so, to my surprise, were my Mom’s. I padded back to the rear bedroom where my parents took turns to sleep, braced the hinge so it wouldn’t squeak, and pushed it gently open. Empty. It was only as I padded back to the kitchen, confused, that I found the note.

‘Gone to your sister’s for the night. Little Evan has colic so I’m going to watch him. I rang Mrs Hso to tell you but she says you and Dawn have gone to a show. there’s dinner in the oven if you’re hungry when you get in. love, Mom’

To my blessed relief, I was alone. There were some considerable advantages to being a latch-key kid. Turning on the light, I went back to the door and shepherded Blixa in. He looked so unexpected, this road-warrior punk standing in my Mom’s kitchen, with Evan’s baby pictures pinned to the fridge and novenas to St Anthony tacked up on the wall, that I wanted to laugh. But Blixa was staring around him like it was the most exotic location on earth.

“Zo zhis is Brooklyn,” he finally observed. I nodded, and poked at the dried-out lasagne in the oven, but I didn’t fancy it. I wasn’t that hungry, to be honest. “It looks like a Jim Jarmusch film. I can’t believe it’s real.”

I nearly burst out laughing, but somehow managed to hold it in. For a moment, I wondered what to do. Should I offer him a drink? My parents kept the drinks cabinet locked since a little incident with Gemma and Sweet Baby Aurora, but there was a shitty gallon jug of wine in the fridge. I could mix it with orange juice to make it palatable. I pondered walking through with him into the front room, wondering what he would make of my Mom’s weird catholic shrine above the television, with an icon of the Pope wreathed in plastic light-up flowers. Better not to risk it. At that moment, I wanted the safety of my bedroom. Oh god, my bedroom, with Blixa fucking Bargeld in it. This was too weird. We had another five or six hours until my Dad came home, but it seemed critical to get him out of the main areas of the apartment before he started... “Oh god, don’t touch that, that’s my Mom’s, and she gets funny if anyone touches her St Anthony shit. Says it’s bad luck. Here, you’ll just have to pretend this is a screwdriver and drink it. Come through.”

Blixa took the weird concoction of cheap white wine and orange concentrate, and tasted it tentatively before following me. I walked into my room, my tiny box-room of a bedroom, that I had been relieved to get to myself after my sister married and moved out. The bunkbeds had been replaced by a futon, and my sister’s posters of Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe had been replaced by my own posters, mostly old Playbills from the 40s and 50s that a theatre down in the Village had been chucking out, but Blixa’s presence, stooping slightly, still made me feel ridiculous and teenage and awkward, ashamed of my poor, girlish taste. I didn’t want the overhead light on, so I plugged in the Christmas tree lights.

Blixa immediately started to laugh, and I suddenly saw my life through his eyes, and cringed. Posters of goth bands still haunting the corners of my walls. The heap of black clothes spilling out of one side of the dresser, the school uniform clobber on the other. This had been an awful mistake. I wanted to curl up and die, wanted to just wither and shrink and disappear through a crack in the warped floorboards.

But Blixa walked forward, enraptured by something as he cupped his hands around something hanging from my fishnet. That, I was slightly proud of. I’d hung a black shower curtain over the bed like some kind of canopy, then stapled a large black fishnet beneath, hanging all of my cheap jewellery and my girly bits and bobs, souvenirs, church medallions, Christmas ornaments, so that they caught the light from the Christmas tree lights, and glittered above my bed.

“Zhis is wonderschön,” he said, his eyes glittering like the fake jewels in a gaudy cross he was admiring, but abruptly, without waiting for an invitation, he deposited the screwdriver on the floor and sprawled out across the bed, tugging at the edge of the heavy curtain covering the only window. “Do you haff a view?”

“Only of the airshaft, and I would not open that, on account of the smell. No one’s cleaned it out in a hundred years.”

“Come and lie down vitt me,” he directed, though he wasn’t looking at me, he just kept inspecting everything in the room, picking up books, ornaments, cassette tapes and examining them curiously before putting them down in a different place.

I bent down to untie my shoelaces, kicked off my boots, then slowly, nervously, spread myself along the furthest edge of the bed away from him, taking great care not to touch him. His belt buckles and studs glittered every time he moved, and it took all my effort not to touch them.

He must have noticed where I was looking, because he laughed gently. “You can, if you vant to.”

“What?” I breathed.

“Undo my buckles.” His grin was almost a challenge. Tentatively, I reached out and touched the leather that constricted his belly. It was softer than I expected, the leather shiny, but worn with use. As I fiddled with the buckle, Blixa reached under my hands, and popped a snap. “Zhis might be easier?” I laughed, and searched with fingertips, delighted to find all the hidden hooks and catches that released him. Over the top, I realised he had wrapped another studded belt, which encircled him twice before connecting up with the bondage straps on his trousers. I puzzled over how to undo that, but Blixa chuckled, watching me unzip him and try to peel him apart.

And finally, the leather case opened, all in one piece like the carapace of an insect, revealing a rather damp and sweaty black shirt beneath. I moved closer, searching with my fingertips, pushing them between leather and cotton, afraid to touch him, but unable to resist. The smell was intense, but not overpowering, sweat and smoke and leather all mixed together, not unpleasant, but musky, like an animal. Bending my head to his chest, I sniffed at him, and inhaled deeply, wanting to drink him in.

He laughed apologetically as he peeled the entire leather vest from around him. “I am ferry smelly. Zer venue was ferry hot tonight, yes? Maybe I should take a shower first. I do not vish to schmutz your bed.”

“A shower,” I said, just feeling my whole body shiver, like I was about to start shaking at any moment. The nearness of his body both excited me and terrified me, as I realised, I wasn’t actually afraid of him. I was afraid of what I would do to him, if I let go of my self-control for even a moment. “OK, sure, let me get you a towel,” I said unconvincingly, trying to buy myself time.

I stood up, dug in my closet for a clean one, and passed it to him, as he stood up and started to disrobe, just there in my bedroom. First the shirt discarded and kicked into a corner, then the boots, rolling his socks in a sweaty ball, saying “Zheez should be burnt!” before turning around to unbuckle and pull off his leather jeans, and though his back was towards me, I almost gaped as he pulled off the scraps of his underwear and kicked those into the heap. For a moment, he stood, the bare white lobes of his almost painfully thin ass twinkling blue and red and gold under the Christmas tree lights before he found the towel and wrapped it around his waist. His arms were like two toothpicks wrapped with elastic bands, he was so thin, but his legs... I found myself wondering how easily I could get my fingers around the circumference of his thighs. Without all that leather, he didn’t look so tough; he looked almost frail.

I lead him back out, through the kitchen, and showed him the tiny bathroom that had once been a pantry, back when we first moved in and the bathtub had been out in the middle of the kitchen. He closed the door, but did not lock it, leaving me wondering what I was supposed to do, if I was supposed to join him, or what. But instead, I sat outside like a guard dog, fretting at the kitchen table, sipping my weird wine-concoction and watching the clock, hoping this wasn’t the one night my Step-Dad’s shift ended early.

He emerged, five minutes later, grinning like a little boy. Stripped of make-up and sweat and all that leather, with his hair soft and clean and dripping all about his face, he looked much younger than the grizzled road warrior I had brought home. Without all the grease and sweat and styling product, his hair wasn’t dark, it was a light, blondish brown. Only his eyes looked old, the deep, puffy circles underneath them, an old man’s eyes in a young man’s face. He returned to the bedroom and I followed, oddly reluctant, digging around to try to find him clean replacements for the clothes he had just discarded. Socks, a plain black T-shirt. I had to go next door to nab a pair of my father’s boxer shorts. But Blixa just lay on the bed, watching me carefully.

I tossed him the shorts, hoping I seemed nonchalant. “I don’t know if these will fit.”

He picked them up and snorted with laughter. “I zhink my ‘hole body vould fit inside one leg. Your Vater is not my size.” But he smiled and looked me up and down with a wolfish expression that make me even more nervous. “You are more my size.”

Taking him at his word, I dug in my dresser and produced something appropriately black. Thank goodness they were clean.

“Stop fussing, come here,” he said quietly. “Ve don’t need clothes right now.”

I went back and sat on the edge of the bed, but the vast marble expanse of his chest, his ribs showing plainly through his almost-transparent skin, it terrified me, what I wanted to do to that skin. Kiss it, bite it, rake my fingernails over it, press my teeth into it until the blood came. “I wish we had some more drugs,” I ventured, to try to force those desires out of my mind.

Obediently, Blixa sat up, and started digging through the lining of his leather jeans, until he found a pocket I hadn’t noticed before, and triumphantly pulled out another small wadge of tin foil. “Ah-hah,” he declared as he unfolded it, for although it looked empty, there was a substantial amount of residue clinging to the inside of a fold. Again, he licked his finger and thrust half of it into my mouth, then repeated the process with the rest. Quickly, I felt the sharp metallic tang of artificial courage rise in the back of my throat, moving towards him and kissing him again, intertwining his bitter-sour aftertaste with my own. As we kissed, his hands moved to my hips, pulling me towards him, though I was terrified to lay more than the palm of my hand against the broad expanse of his back. But when his hand touched my breast, my nipple already rising towards him, I stiffened, feeling my whole body pulse as if with an electric shock.

He noticed, I couldn’t believe he noticed, as if his entire body was just an electrical wire attuned to my reactions, and opened his eyes wide. “Vhat’s rong?”

“I...” I moved my hand purposefully down the slope of his shoulder towards his neck, feeling for the pulse in the hollow of his collarbone. “Nothing’s wrong, I just...”

He bent forward, and kissed me, tenderly, in the same place on my own neck, letting his teeth catch me every so gently, puckering my skin and sending little shimmering bursts of pleasure all across my skin, which flushed slightly, as the room seemed to grow hotter. “ _Was_?”

“The fucking heating’s coming on, the Super’s a fucking drunk and often forgets to turn it off in the spring, my room is going to get so hot, and...”

“Open a vindow,” he said calmly. “Ve are about to get very hot indeed.”

“I can’t, the smell is overpowering,” I hedged, though my mouth was on his shoulder now, gnawing, sucking, before I forcibly stopped myself.

“Nutzing is overpowering unless you allow yourself to be overpowered,” he intoned, as his head lolled back. For a minute, he allowed himself to be kissed, and then he put his hand, gently but firmly, on top of mine, and moved it insistently down his body towards his groin. I tried to stop him, fought back, pulled away from him, and he immediately stopped and opened his eyes wide. “Do you not vant to do zhis, or are vee playing a game vhere you vant me to force you?”

For a horrible moment, I imagined it, let myself go limp with lust, imagining him pushing me down onto the bed and forcing himself between my legs, pushing inside me, and then... and then... and then? My mind went blank. I had no idea. And in that awful moment, the drugs blurted out what I was trying so hard to keep from him. “I have no idea. I _do_ want to do this, but I have just never done this before.”

In that moment, everything changed.. His face went even paler, as for the first time, fear showed in his eyes. “Mein Gott,” he said, completely frozen. For a long minute, neither of us said anything, as my shame burned in my face. “Maybe I should leaf.”

I blushed even harder, feeling my shame and my self-loathing rising to choke my throat so I could barely speak. “Um, if you want to go, I’ll walk you to the subway, but, uh, the G barely runs this time of night, and you’ll have to change for the L at Williamsburg...” I rambled, trying desperately to grab for the magic words to make him stay.

“Do you vant I should leaf?” he asked, sitting up and casting about for his clothes. He found my little cotton panties and pulled them on, as I stared, rapt, at the monster distorting their seams.

I shook my head briskly, not even daring to speak as he pulled his leather pants back on, moving away from me as if he were afraid to touch me now. The leather bondage belt was in a tangle by the bed, and he had to stop to untie the mess I had made of it. Christ, why had I ruined it like this. “I can’t stop you if you want to go, but... I don’t want you to go.” He dropped the belt and turned around, putting his hands into his hair, leaving it standing up in little clumps on one side. “Oh god, I know I’ve spoiled it for you. I want it... I want you. But this is not what you expected, not what you wanted at all, is it. I’m so sorry.”

“Not vhat I vant?” Blixa almost laughed aloud, making me feel about two feet small, so that I almost didn’t believe what came next. “I’m in Brooklyn, in a tenement building, in an apartment like somezing out of Jarmusch film, with zis beautiful American teenager... a _wirgin_ , a good, pure, catholic girl vitt eyes like sin, who kisses me like her mouth is on fire... and you think zis is not vhat I vant? Kröte, zhis is like my kinkiest fantasy come to life. This is zeh dream, of vhat every musician in West Berlin hopes might happen venn they go to New York. But is this _your_ fantasy? Zhis is your first time, it should be something special, something wonderschön and beautiful.”

I blinked back tears, disbelieving what I was hearing, this idea that my shitty life was something this beautiful man could have fantasises about. “You think this isn’t special for me? You think this isn’t wonderschön? You think this isn’t my fantasy? Me, you, a beautiful German with a face like an expressionist film star who knows who Bertolt Brecht and Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch are?” I gestured up to the wall, my eyes catching on a poster of Conrad Veidt in the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. With Blixa’s thick hair hanging damply in his face, the resemblance was striking.

Screwing up his face, he rubbed at it with both hands, then dug in his leather jacket. “Christ, I need a cigarette...”

“You can’t smoke in here,” I stuttered. A boy in my room was one thing, but if my Step-Dad caught me with cigarettes, Jesus Christ, that would really be the end.

“Vhere can I smoke?” he demanded, wrapping his leather jacket around his bare shoulders as he pulled out a cigarette and placed it between his lips as if he could suck the nicotine straight from its unlit end. “Can I smoke out off zeh bat-room window? Surely zhat can’t make zee smell any vorse?”

I thought for a minute, then scrambled for my slippers. “Let’s go upstairs. You can smoke on Tar Beach.” He just looked at me blankly. “We can go up to the roof. Here, carry this for me...” I stripped the blankets off the bed and tossed them to him, then led him out into the passage and pulled down the ladder to the roof.

I climbed up, searched my pockets for my keys, and unlocked the padlock, then pushed open the hatch. We were barely halfway up the ladder when Blixa lit up his cigarette, but as we came out onto the flat expanse of the roof, he gasped, and then nearly choked in a cloud of smoke. “Oh my god.”

“Nice, isn’t it.” My building, although cheap and poorly constructed, was the tallest on the block, so you could see from the roof, clear over the factories on the Greenpoint shore, all the way to the fabled skyline of Manhattan. I had just grown up with it, to the point where I had just come to think of it as normal, that everyone had such a view from their back yard, but it took Blixa’s breath away.

“Zer skyscrapers,” he gasped, moving towards the parapet as if in a dream. “Zhey’re so close, I could chust reach out and pluck zhem like luminescent fruit.” He looked about him, dazzled, his whole face lit up with childlike joy.

I took the blankets from him as he puffed and stared, then stared and puffed some more. “The view is best if you come and sit here.” I directed, walking back to a rusted swinging sun-lounger that my Step-Dad had raised up on blocks. The vinyl mattress was cracked and faded, but in the long summer holidays, we had often taken turns to sleep up under the stars, catching the cool but sometimes smelly breezes off the river if the Newtown Creek was having a particularly reeky day. Spreading the blankets over it, I made a kind of nest, and lay down, feeling its elderly springs squeeze to life as it rocked slightly under my weight.

“Zis is... Zis is...” Blixa Bargeld, lost for words, as he just stared out into the glittering darkness, his face utterly transfixed.

“This is just where I grew up.”

“Vhen you are on Manhattan, zer buildings are zo tall one never really gets zer sense of being on an island. But from here, on zer mainland, it becomes zo apparent...”

I burst out laughing.

“Vhat?”

“Brooklyn’s not the mainland, silly. We’re on another island here.”

He turned to look at me, eyeing me carefully. “Zhen we are botze children of island cities.”

“Is Berlin an island?” I frowned, wondering if he thought I was stupid. I had looked at East Germany on a map, and was sure that Berlin was landlocked.

“Also,” he said. “Your island is ringed by glass und vater. My island is ringed by concrete und barbed vire und communist soldiers vitt guns.” The faster he talked, more impenetrable his accent became, until he sounded almost completely German.

I shuddered, as I thought about it, and saw, for only a split second, how exotic we were to each other. Him on his tiny concrete island of democracy, surrounded on all sides by communists hordes, and me in this tiny shithole pocket of poverty, surrounded on all sides by the glittering wealth of 80s Manhattan. But the moment passed in silence. Our worlds were unknowable to each other.

“I’m cold,” he said, and extinguished his cigarette after lighting a second one from the tip of his first. He retreated back from the parapet to join me, folding his long limbs into the mattress, setting the whole thing rocking back and forth like a cradle. I put my arms around him and pulled him close, even as he continued to stare, astonished, over my shoulder at the view.

I kissed his shoulders. I kissed the thin, wiry muscles of his forearms. I kissed his chest, and the two brown smudges of his nipples. I kissed his ribs and his neck and his cheeks and then his mouth found mine and our two bodies curled together like a pair of newts. Without the oppressive, stifling heat of my bedroom, and the fear of being interrupted in that bedroom with the door that didn’t lock (my mother, fat and nearly forty, could no longer manage the ladder to the roof) kissing him felt again like the most amazing thing.

We kissed, and he tried to smoke at the same time, but I knew he was serious when he chucked the unfinished cigarette away from him and addressed the attentions of his mouth entirely towards me.

“You vant to do this,” he said, again, as his hands started to wander. I sat up, and pulled off my T-shirt, my nipples already hard in the cool air as his mouth found the tender parts of my breasts. I dug my fingers into his hair, soft and thick without all of that hairspray, and held him against my chest, savouring the way he made my whole skin feel like it was lighting up from inside.

“I want to do this,” I reassured him, reaching down to push my jeans off my hips, feeling, with the way my skin was singing, that it was intolerable to be wearing clothes with his skin so near. He kissed my rounded belly, he kissed my embarrassing thighs, he put his mouth between my legs and kissed me between the folds of my skin, and suddenly I felt electricity surging inside me, like tiny flames were licking all up and down my insides. It was the same electric rush of the speed, but somehow better, more urgent, more sure of what it wanted, and what it wanted was him, down there in that dark place that troubled my adolescent dreams. “I want you inside me. I don’t care if it hurts.”

He withdrew, his face glistening, and smiled wolfishly. “Zhere are vays to make it not hurt.”

“How would you know,” I retorted, kissing that sharply pointed nose just at the crooked bit at the top.

He raised his eyebrows at me, and leered so lasciviously I felt something break inside me. Whatever he wanted, I knew I would do it. “Zhere are vays for men to lose zheir wirginity, too, you know.”

It suddenly hit me, what he meant. “You like boys.”

He shrugged nonchalantly. “I like boys. I like girls. I chust like sex. Fucking. Being fucked. It’s all nice.” The way he spoke made it sound like so _not big_ a deal. But more than anything, it sounded like he knew what he was doing.

“Do it,” I urged, and clung to him, kissing him hard and sucking his tongue into my mouth.

He shifted, and moved his mouth to my ear, whispering so softly that his breath tickled my skin. “I’m chust going to put one little finger inside you, first.”

“Do it,” I whimpered, bracing myself for pain. But there was no pain. There was just the sensation of being unzipped, unpeeled like a ripe banana, as something slipped inside me. Unknown, unnameable sensations seemed to be pulsing all around his finger, not pleasure, not pain, but something wholly different and new. The desire to be penetrated, punctured, filled up, to swallow more and more of him, to suck him all in and suck him up inside me and never let him go. “More,” I insisted.

“More?” he echoed into my ear, then shifted. “I try my middle finger. Shout if I hurt you.” The intimate whisper inside my head combined with the exquisite sensation of his finger slipping inside my vulva. I felt a pressure, almost unbearable for a moment, but then he seemed to slip deeper inside, and the pleasure almost overwhelmed me. “Let’s chust stay like zhis for a minute, see how it feels.” He twitched one of his joints, and my whole interior shuddered like a tiny earthquake.

“More,” I demanded, starting to writhe against him, wanting him to do that thing with his knuckle again.

“I vill try getting...” He shifted again, and the throbbing sensation inside me seemed to flutter and clench, then release. “Two fingers. Does it hurt?”

“No,” I whimpered, and gasped, and sucked at his tongue, almost clawing against him, rubbing my chest against his to feel my nipples catch his. “What is the opposite of pain? Pleasure? Is that the word for this? It feels... aaah.. oh god. Inadequate.”

“Pleasure is not zee opposite of pain,” he said, softly biting my earlobe, pulling and stretching it until I started to writhe. “Zhey are chust next door to each other. Numbness, a lack of all feeling, zhat is the opposite of botze.”

I reached down, and my hand brushed against his cock, standing erect against my stomach. It seemed exaggeratedly large, like I could not believe it would ever fit inside me. But then again, I had seen how long and elegant his fingers were, and now two of them were somehow inside me. He was moving them now, rubbing gently back and forth, the sensation as they slipped back and forth between my lips almost too much to bear. His other hand grasped mine, and brought it down on top of his cock, and this time, I didn’t resist. I grabbed a dirty great handful of him, measuring his girth with my fingers, as I squeezed.

“Ah, not so hard...” I relaxed, and he started to move my hand up and down. “Like zhis... yes... oh yes...” His eyes relaxed, started to half close, and the strokes of my fingers slowed down and the strokes of his fingers sped up. “You are so vet it’s hard to keep a grip.”

“What if you put it inside me,” I barely dared to suggest. Come on, I knew how the mechanics of this thing worked. The school of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow had taught us nothing more than embarrassed giggles and hints about mortal sin, but The Naz had got an ‘educational video’ that claimed to be made in Sweden, and forced us to watch it, marvelling at the way the heavily bearded and hairy 70s Swedes managed to get their uncircumcised cocks inside their bouncing blonde partners.

“I don’t vant to hurt you, but I’m so turned on, I'm afraid if I get inside you, I’m chust going to start hammering away,” he said, obviously trying to be serious, but the image of him hammering, after the various mechanical things going on onstage with this band, it made both of us giggle.

“Hammering,” I said sagely, making both of us laugh aloud.

“Bucking like a donkey,” he offered.

“Vucking like a donkey,” I giggled, making fun of his accent, amazed that sex was proving to be so damned funny. “It’s OK. I worked at the donkey rides on Coney Island for two summers. I can handle a vucking donkey.”

He laughed and kissed me, pushing my hair out of my face with one hand as he removed the other from inside me, then looked about. Not knowing where else to wipe it, he put his fingers inside his mouth and licked them, with the same intense concentrated pleasure as when he had rubbed the last of the speed into his gums.

“I vill lie back, so I don’t kick like a mule. You get on top of me, and zhat vay, you can go at your own speed, OK?” He lifted me gently by the hips, as if I didn’t weigh a thing, and pulled me on top of him. I looked down at his cock, flopping helplessly against his belly, looked it straight in its single eye, and addressed it.

“OK. You’re going in me.”

Blixa laughed, touched my face tenderly, then tried to adjust himself. The first time, it didn’t work at all. He just slid backwards, then slipped between my thighs, emerging between the cheeks of my butt. We both giggled, he tweaked my nipple playfully, then I raised myself, and we gave it another go. This time, he got almost inside me, but then I felt my lips go funny, and he slipped out, and bounced to the front. “Ow,” he winced, as my weight came down on him. “Hang on, hang on, let me hold him up straight for you.”

“Him?” I giggled, glad that he was not taking this embarrassing failure even remotely seriously. “Does he have a name?”

“Yü-Gung,” he supplied, then risked a lop-sided grin. “Vhat else do you think it means, _fütter mein ego_?”

As I was relaxed and laughing, he held his cock with one hand, and pulled me down on top of him with the other, and suddenly I felt a brief pop, and a moment of intense pressure, and I looked at him with shock and surprise, as I realised he was inside me. All of him. That whole monster of a white, one-eyed worm had somehow disappeared up inside me. He grinned up at me proudly, his eyes blue slits, his long dark lashes brushing his cheeks. For nearly a minute, I just sat there like that, too afraid to move for fear of hurting something, but then the urge came, to gently move my hips. It felt nice. Blixa moaned. I moved to the other direction, trying to adjust myself, almost like there was an itch and I needed to scratch it. Blixa groaned, even louder, a weird yowling noise like a cat.

“Am I hurting you?” I asked, worried.

“Not zhat you need vorry about,” he whispered, writhing and arching his back, his hands leaving my shoulders and flopping up over his head, clutching the chain of the sun-lounger, his whole chest laid bare in front of me like a painting of Saint Sebastian.

“Vhat if I vuck like zeh donkey,” I teased, moving my hips around in a circle, trying to work out which direction best stirred up the little eddies of pleasure spiralling around inside me.

“Do it,” he laughed, and tangled his hands in the chain as if holding on for dear life against the movement of the sofa. I started to rock, backwards and forwards, and then side to side, chasing that weird little itch of pleasure. It wasn’t enough just to reach it with his cock, it was like I had to grind it back and forth against it. But the pleasure thing was like some weird reverse backscratcher. To reach the itch on the left, I had to move my whole body to the right, his cock shifting slightly inside me until he moaned.

“Are you alright?” I exclaimed, moving back to the centre.

“Fine, keep going!” he almost barked, then started to whimper, the whimpers turning into pants, and then that rasping animal moan again.

“Are you sure?”

“Kröte,” he told me very seriously, opening his eyes and looking straight at me. “Moaning means it’s good. In fact it’s strange to me, zhat you are so quiet.”

“Oh,” I said, and leaned backwards until I was almost perpendicular, still trying to reach that little itch of pleasure.

Blixa yelped and sat up, seizing me around the waist and pulling me back towards him. “Nein! Nicht dieser Weg! It doesn’t go zhat vay.”

“Sorry!”

He lifted me gently, and moved me into his lap, cradling me with his arms, as he got the motion of the swing working, jerking into me again and again, harder and harder. His mouth met my nipple, biting at it and sending little ripples shuddering down my spine as he tried to work his way deeper and deeper inside me. How long we stayed like that, I don’t know. It wasn’t that time did one of those little drug-induced jump-cuts again, it was more that the act of sex seemed to stop time itself, every heartbeat compressed down to the repetitive motion of trying to hit that little pleasure point over and over and over again. A light sweat broke out across Blixa’s forehead, and I pushed his hair back, marvelling over his wide forehead, the expressive commas of his eyebrows, over those deep, liquid blue eyes.

His lips moved to my ear, panting breathily as he whispered. “I can’t hold off much longer. I’m going to come soon. I’m going to flip you over on your back, because I don’t want to be inside you when I come, OK?”

“OK.” I nodded, and he lifted me again, as easily as if he were just picking up his guitar, and flipped me over. The sun-lounger protested, set off rocking like a capsized boat, but Blixa held me firm, pushing my legs wide as he burrowed into me, his hips bucking against my thighs until finally, he threw his head back, let out one of those strange cat-like yowls, and pulled his now glistening and flushed cock from inside me, holding it against my stomach as it quivered and pulsed, and then shot one, two, three little arcs of pearlescent liquid across my chest.

“Christ,” he murmured, letting his head slump back against my chest as he just held me tight, squeezing me until I thought I would burst. I could feel his heartbeat still pounding against my skin, his whole skin flushed, until finally, his breathing slowed, and he started to move his head against me, rubbing his cheekbone against my breast as he kissed my nipple. So that was sex. Well, that was interesting. I ran my fingers through his hair over and over, caressing the soft, silky suede of the shaved sides. It was some time before he spoke. “You didn’t come, did you.”

That gave me pause. The whole thing had felt pretty darn nice, so how was I supposed to tell which specific bit had been an orgasm or not? “How would I know?”

Blixa laughed, a deep throaty laugh, and kissed me tenderly. “You vould know.” I just looked at him quizzically. “Hold on, let me see vhat I can do.” He slid down my body, and put his head between my thighs, burrowing his face into the slick, wet crevice he had just vacated. Something warm and wet – his tongue? – slipped inside me. He seemed to be searching for something, running it back and forth along my vulva, until the tiny tickle of pleasure that I had spent so long chasing with his cock suddenly burst into a glittering technicolour firework of pleasure. I inhaled sharply, and gasped, and he let out a little “Ah-ha!” He pressed his tongue up against it, and the firework display started anew, just ripples and ripples of a tingling, dizzying... _niceness_. Pleasure wasn’t even the right word for it. It was like the concentrated effect of every nerve in the lower half of my body, shimmering under the tip of his tongue.

And then he started to move his tongue, very fast, vibrating it against my pleasure point. I let out a long, yowling wail, clutching my fingers into the tangled mass of his soft hair, and then my body exploded. I couldn’t catch my breath. It was like waves and waves of tiny pleasure particles just broke inside me, releasing a flood that rolled back up my body like the ripples on a pond. For a moment, I thought I was going to pass out, my vision going completely grey, until slowly it cleared, leaving me feeling slightly tingling, like pins and needles all down my legs. I lifted my head and looked down, to see Blixa grinning at me, his lips and chin wet with my juices, looking as proud as punch. “So. I think you know now, ja?”

“Come here,” I growled, and held out my arms. He moved back towards me, encircling me and folding me against his chest. I felt such a deep peace I wanted to swoon into sleep, but the humming and thrumming in my head just wouldn’t stop. “Oh god I’m so tired but I can’t sleep, there’s too much humming and buzzing and all this electrical discharge energy still in my head,” I murmured to his skinny chest.

“Zhat is, unfortunately, an after-effect of zee amphetamine,” Blixa chuckled softly, kissing the top of my head.

I opened one eye and looked up at him, wondering if that soft orange glow in the corner of my eye was the dawn, or just the Long Island Railroad glowing softly in the distance. “You nicked that Valium from the Chelsea Hotel. I saw you do it. That would get us to sleep, wouldn’t it?”

“You, my loff,” he intoned, kissing each of my eyelids in turn, “Are a genius.” Digging in the blankets, he extracted the leather jeans I had been too single-minded to even notice him kick off, and rummaged around in the internal pocket until he produced two small blue pills. “Do you still have zhat orange juice?” I cast about and found it, abandoned, at the head of the sun-lounger. Miraculously, all of our bouncing about had not managed to spill any. Together, one after another, we swallowed our Valium, washed it down with a gulp of the nasty concoction, then settled back down into the blankets, mouth to mouth, lips tickling one against the other until we fell asleep.


End file.
